Happy Place(58)

The morning we found out Hank was gone.

The deep, painful silence in our San Francisco apartment.

The night he broke my heart.

I shake myself. “What have we got to lose except for thousands of dollars we don’t have and limbs we’re fairly accustomed to and—” I scrabble for his arm as the Ferris wheel lurches to life, sweeping forward along the loading dock and then shooting us skyward.

As the ground drops away, Wyn’s face lights in alternating hues of neon, colors pulsing in a nonsensical rhythm.

For a few seconds, I’m hypnotized.

Okay, realistically, I have no concept of how long I’m hypnotized. The weed is still making time stretchy as taffy. Some colors paint his face for eons, and others flash so fast I hardly have time to register them.

The bitter salty breeze runs through his hair as we lift higher into the night, the smell of burnt sugar still clinging to his clothes.

“You’re staring, Harriet,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Am I?” I say. “Or are you just high?”

When he laughs, I become intensely aware of my fingers, still clutching his forearm, and of the smooth, dry texture of his skin. Up close, whenever he’s been out in the sun, there are millions of tiny dark freckles, small as sand grains, scattered over his skin. I want to touch all of them. In my current state, that could take days.

Wedged together like this, I feel his breath moving in and out of his lungs, his heartbeat tapping out messages in Morse code.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.

“Like what?” I say, a bit thickly.

He tucks his chin. “Like you want to eat me.”

“Because,” I say, “I want to eat you.”

He touches his thumb against the middle of my chin, the air taking on an electrical charge. “Is that the weed talking,” he teases gently, “or is it that I’ve still got powdered sugar on my mouth?”

For someone who’s spent a lifetime living inside her own mind, I become nothing but a body alarmingly fast, all buzzing nerve endings and tingling skin.

“This is confusing,” I whisper.

“I don’t feel confused,” he says.

“You must not be as high as me.”

His smile unfurls from one corner of his mouth, never quite making it to the other. “I know I’m not as high as you. You look like you ate a trash bag full of catnip.”

“I can feel my blood,” I say. “And these colors have tastes.”

“You’re not wrong,” he says.

“What do they taste like to you?” I ask.

He closes his eyes, his nose tipping up, the breeze ruffling his T-shirt. When he opens his eyes, his pupils have overtaken his irises. “Red gummy.”

I snort. “How astute.”

His eyes flash, lightning crackling in the pre-tornado green of them. “Okay, fine,” he says. “You want the truth?”

“About what these lights taste like?” I say. “Dying for it.”

His hand slides off the lap bar, the tips of his fingers dragging up the outside of my thigh all the way to my hip, his eyes watching their progress. “They taste like this fabric.”

I’m trying my best not to shiver, not to nuzzle into him, because the light pressure of his fingers against the satin of my sundress does in fact have a taste right now, and it’s delicious.

“Soft,” he says. The backs of his fingernails drag back down my thigh, sliding past the hem of my dress to the bare skin above my knee. My head falls back of its own volition. “Delicate. So fucking light it dissolves on your tongue.”

His eyes meet mine. His nails drag back up, a little heavier. For several seconds, or minutes, or hours, we hold on to each other’s gazes while his hand makes slow passes, up, down, up a little higher.

“Can I see more pictures?” he says.

I startle from my lust haze. “What?”

“Of your pottery,” he says.

“It’s not good,” I say.

“I don’t care,” he says. “Can I see it?”

Our gazes hold again. I’m really struggling to move at a normal pace. Every time I look at him, everything else stops, like we’re floating outside time and space.

I fumble my phone out and flip through my pictures.

Aside from a handful of targeted ads for murder mystery TV shows I wanted to remember to watch, there isn’t much to get through before I make it to shots of my last few projects. A mug, two different vases, another bowl that doesn’t really look butt-like at all. Or hardly, anyway.

I pass him my phone. He studies it, his tongue tracing over his bottom lip as he slowly flips through the pictures. We’ve done at least one full rotation on the Ferris wheel by the time he reaches the last one and starts flipping back the other way, pausing on each, zooming in to see the details of the glazes.

“This one.” He’s staring at the smaller of the vases, streaked with shades of green, blue, purple, and brown, a horizon of earthy colors.

My heart squeezes. “That one’s called Hank.”

He looks up, face open, with the expression that used to make me think of quicksand, a face that could pull you in and never let you go.

“You named it?” he says. “After my dad?”